The breakfast Carrin Alba prepared was simple--scrambled eggs and orange juice--but made, like most everything the 27-year-old Cerritos College student does, with great care. The table was set with place mats, matching napkins and silverware, and in the early morning sunlight her small kitchen looked immaculate. Every weekday morning before school, Carrin gets up at 8 to feed her two cats, Blackie and Shadow, and to clean the tidy four-bedroom house in Norwalk that she shares with a roommate.

For eight years, he did the fixing up and she did the cleaning and cooking and made the beer runs. Then they broke up. Five years later, an appeals court has agreed that Harlan Ray must give Linda Walsh $6,600 in housekeeping pay. "This opens the door for an argument that true roommates, not even boyfriend-girlfriend, could end up with the same results," said Ray's attorney, Daniel Berkos. Walsh and her two sons moved into Ray's home after they met in 1979.

It took a serious knee injury to her friend and roommate, Tina Hutchinson, to help make Dee Dee Duncan the complete player she is today. Duncan's turnabout came after she scored a career-high 24 points last December in the Aztecs' 77-73 loss to Southern Illinois in the Dial tournament championship game in which Hutchinson and center Toni Wallace were injured. "It was up to me," said Duncan, a junior criminal justice major.

A Lake Forest mechanic who kicked out his roommate after an argument last weekend will be charged today with later abducting the man, murdering him and then dumping his battered body in Cajon Pass in San Bernardino County. Jean P.

Soon after she settled into her new dorm room at Cal State Northridge, Brittany Brockman figured she should give her new roommate fair warning: She's a bit of a neat freak. Her roommate, Leslie Rosales, 18, didn't make much of the admission. But she didn't know yet just how serious Brockman was. Brockman, 18, folds all of her clothes impeccably and organizes them by color. She doesn't like a dirty shower. And when the trash needs to be taken out, it needs to be taken out now . Inside a freshly decorated (mostly pink)

I went to see " The Social Network" this weekend as a sort of anthropological mission. I was hunting for something in the story of Facebook's beginnings to help me understand the latest tragedy linked to cyber-bullying: the suicide of a Rutgers University freshman after his roommate used a webcam to secretly capture his sexual encounter with a young man, and broadcast it on the Internet. Some are calling it a prank that went too far; others say it's a hate crime worthy of manslaughter charges.

A convicted felon who once shared an apartment with the man suspected of killing six women in San Diego said Thursday that his former roommate committed frequent burglaries, spoke often of stabbing people and once came home with blood drippings on his pants. The man was granted immunity in testifying at the preliminary hearing of Cleophus Prince Jr., the 24-year-old Birmingham, Ala.

When Thorsten Biermann arrived at the Florida Flight Training Center a year ago for a six-week course for an instrument license, he was pleased to be housed with three other German-speaking students in a school-owned apartment within walking distance of the airfield. One of his roommates, a congenial Lebanese, was even willing to cook most of the group's dinners and lend the others his red Mitsubishi--the only transportation the four students had.

When Leslie Lobel was a student at Tufts University in the late 1970s, her dormitory roommates learned a simple code when they wanted to be left alone for a sexual romp: "There was a Dry Erase board and you would write, 'Come back in 20 minutes.' Sometimes you were locked out, and sometimes you were fortunate enough to be the one locking someone else out." Students did not rely on rules or handbooks to understand they needed to figure out how to navigate one simple equation of freshman life: randy students, minus pesky parents, equals sexual freedom.

Question: I am a single woman, and none of my single friends has the money to take a vacation. And my married friends want to travel with their spouses. Yet everything I see is geared for two. I don't want to have a stranger as my roommate at a resort, on a cruise or on a singles trip. Do you have any suggestions so I don't have to pay the huge premium to have my own room? A. Siegel Studio City Answer: This is an age-old problem for single and older women who want to travel but don't want to get stuck with a big bill, with a whack-job roommate or with being the odd woman out. People who are paired up aren't always welcoming to solo travelers, said Mary Ann Zimmerman, who runs SWT Tours ( www.poshnosh.com )